Flaunting Goodness Not Good Enough

Trump could win, Hillary is vulnerable. Why? Because Trump is much taller, and a male. The sheep prefer this sort of leader to bleat behind. This is our world, or, at least, that of the leading country. Not all countries are this way: several countries, even some Muslim countries, elected short women (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mauritius, etc.)

Nobody said that being good was easy. It is actually very hard to think so correctly that one can act for the best. And it’s getting harder, because the world is quickly getting more complex and dynamics. Yet, as with nearly all things, one can train for goodness, and the superior logic it needs. And the trainer, paradoxically, is called anger. Thus the refugee crisis in Europe makes Europe angry, and, thus, more reflective. Anger insures that solutions, hopefully not final, will be found.

Two books just out relate that the Vatican bathes in corruption (in spite of the present Pope’s crackdown). Apparently the Pope’s angry denunciations of the “15 maladies” Cardinals are affected by, what not enough. The Pope needs to get… angrier. Obviously calm and determination have not been enough, the Pope needs to do like Jesus, and use violence. Love, without a big, hard stick, and the will to smack it, is just a wet noodle. Even Jesus’ followers advertised this tough reality.

By Excluding Women, The Bohemian Club Proclaims Excluding Half Of Humanity To Start With, Is An Example To Follow

A mystery related to the problem of goodness: why is The Guardian censoring me?

Superficially, The Guardian, just like the New York Times, or your humble servant, want to relate real reality, with an eye to justice. I understand the hostility of the NYT: after all I was stridently opposed to its will to invade Iraq, and the lying propaganda (straight from Bush’s White House) it used to achieve that hysteria. The truth, though, is simpler: immense wealth controls the Main Stream Media.

A funny example of Internet manipulations which should be illegal: Scientific American published several raving descriptions and interviews with Lisa Randall, a publicity hungry physicist who just published a book claiming Dark Matter extinguished the dinosaurs. It should sell beautifully, as it is really a wacky idea (Dark Matter would have disturbed a comet: boom!). Scientific American’s publisher also publishes that book. Thus most critical comments were removed. That makes Scientific American identical to the Daily Mail.

Some comments appeared, like mine, and then were removed. Of course, “it’s their right”, in the present (plutocratic) legal system, to do so. Just as it is the right of plutocratic “Bohemian Club“, north of San Francisco, to forbid women to attend. It was also a right, at some point, to own people, at least in the USA.

Such laws ought to be changed. Web sites ought to be allowed to remove comments for no good reason, only when it’s justified.

Goodness can be a trap for those who want to be really good, not just persuading themselves that they are good: look at Obama, who wants to look good, even relative to

himself. So he had a completely ineffective presidency (yes even Obamacare does not seem to be working, even while just looking at the latest graphs from the New York Times).

Once the Guardian ran an article on the dark side of Islam, but they forgot (!) to quote the Qur’an. I sent a handful of famous verses, complete with exact reference (the numbers of the sura and verse) the sort which recommend to “fight, ambush and kill” so-called “unbelievers”. That was obviously racist on my part, I forgot the arcane reasoning of the sheep. To the baboon, sheep logic can be impenetrable. Great stupidity, like great intelligence, is hard to fathom.

What is going on here, in Islamophilia land? Some “””intellectuals”””” decided, a while back that “Islamophobia is racism”. But that’s not the only things they decided. The same pseudo-intellectuals also IMPLICITLY decided that Islam was Salafism and Wahhabism (the former was subject to the death penalty in 1200 CE Egypt, by the way). These are just two (roughly identical) variants of Islam, the really hard core ones, 2 out of 100.

Then, of course there was a problem for those who love to exhibit manifest kindness: the Qur’an is full of what, interpreted literally, normally emotionally endowed people would have to admit are pretty vicious verses. So the pseudo-intellectuals, having started with the principle that anything which puts what they call Islam in a bad light is racist, then conclude that any quoting of Islam’s sacred texts is… vicious and racist.

As the Qur’an itself recognizes, No war, no heroes. It could be a war against Mars (Kepler dixit), or hatred, or one for orphaned children. But it will be hard & grim always. (Thus Jihad is a good concept, no wonder it is so attractive; I am the first to admit lots of Jihad, in the secular sense, is needed today.)

Methinks that moral integrity means that our higher principles have to be coherent with how we occupy our brains.

But then, of course, it’s not enough. People have to be able to think right, and to think right, under pressure.

How to achieve this? One has to train. Thinking right while angry is paramount for this training. By the way, I may be the first to write this black on white. However, many philosophers before embraced implicitly this modus operandi. Socrates was assassinated legally, because he had enraged most of the Athenian population. Yet, his critiques would have made Athens much stronger, if they had been solved the way Rome, and then the European Middle Ages, addressed them. One needs strong emotions to melt obsolete neural networks. Thus the passions are allies of deep thinking. The fiercest emotions cannot just be tamed, they are indispensable allies. Such is the connection between philosophy and violence, blatant, as it is, throughout history.

As Lao Tzu put it: “Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”

31 Responses to “Flaunting Goodness Not Good Enough”

The problem with anger is that it does tend to blind you to what is outside the point of your focus. It should probably be noted that there is essentially a civil war occurring in Islam over the past generation and the west has poured some amount of fuel on it.
Which is certainly not to absolve it from being a medieval political movement, but just to point out that in the larger scheme of things, it seems to be consuming itself. Just wait until the Saudis reap the world wide whirlwind they have sown for the last thirty five years. Likely with much US instigation.

I live and work in a family business with some people with very powerful emotions. They do drive the business forward. That said, there does tend to be a certain lack of objectivity and I tend to one of those who do sit back and try to see the bigger picture.
As such, I think it is more of problem for our society that we have a medium of exchange that has become a rent extraction device run amok, rather that what the medievals are doing in some of the darker corners of the world. Not to say it isn’t a problem, but if they overrun us, it will be more that we self destructed, than that they overpowered us.

The problem is not objectivity, or lack thereof. The problem is too much of the same old objectivity.
Agreed about the medieval and the money problem (itself part of blossoming plutocracy). However, both problem are entangled: for example, American plutocracy enabled, and even instigated, Nazism. Same with the Middle Eastern Salafism and other medieval.
See:https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/great-bitter-lake/

Worse: the metalogic tied to Islamophilia (say) are conducive and identical to tolerating the metalogic which enables plutocracy to blossom.
PA

Keeping in mind that one of their seeming strengths is greater fertility, which is based on a more primitive culture, while ours is contained by that wealth extraction process which makes it difficult for westerners to have both families and reasonably successful careers.

Otherwise known as eating the seed.
And of course, the oldest methods of civil control are to focus the masses on the Perfidious Other, while teaching them their own shackles, such as the monetary mediation of an atomized society, are gifts from the benevolent authority provided for them.
Unfortunately for them, they cheat on the foundations to put more gold in the penthouse.
Feet of clay indeed.

I think the ebb and flow runs much deeper. WW2 set loose a wave of industrialization which allowed the financial sector to skim off significant profits, without disrupting the whole process. You have to consider where the weaknesses are today, to sense what this collapse will produce.
Much as government was essentially private enterprise, as monarchy and they destroyed their own mandate, resulting in it becoming a public trust, so too is private banking proving it is too susceptible to corruption and should be treated as a public utility. Of course, it took a couple of hundred years to really push monarchy aside and there was never a full clarification of why it failed. So too it will take a while to really establish socially organic mediums of exchange and there should be intense debate beforehand, to both spread the message and formulate options.
Here is an interesting link:http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org
There are various blogs which expound on modern monetary theory as well. Naked Capitalism is one of my favorites;http://www.nakedcapitalism.com

There is no ebb and flow, at the onset of a tsunami. It may look like that a bit, but then, when those 30 meters high bore waves bore on you, ebb and flow is nothing one wants to contemplate.

Also the Nazification of Germany was rendered possible by American banks and American Dark Money. So what is going on now is a CONTINUATION of something started more than a CENTURY ago. (JP Morgan saved Wall Street in 1908, by buying the market, but Dr. Schacht was his protege’. Schacht brought Hitler, 25 YEARS LATER, to government (by singing Hitler’s praises to the entire German establishment, including Hindenburg and Von Papen).

Patrice,
It was my point that this is more a continuation, than a repeat and as such is one large tsunami.
Yes, it will overwhelm much of civilization as we know it, but that might not be an entirely bad thing.
They are cannibalizing their own, by sucking value out of the industrial system that financialization made possible. The behemoth is about to have a self induced heart attack

So massive war and holocaust is going to be good? Well, it could ultimately turn out to be good (except for the victims), as it has, in the past. However, this is basically like saying Auschwitz was a good thing. The Jews will disagree. And that’s the point: war can annihilate not just peoples (genocide) but entire valuable culture (although there are also NON valuable cultures, say many superstitious religions, like Salafism).

Re the Bohemian club/grove, can one find an institution more in tune with the Anglo elites mores than it? I mean, it’s old boys networking for their own class and personal profit, under the guise of bullshit esoterism and 19th Century German secret societies/bullshit mysticism (human sacrifices, even pretend ones, nice), all the while the plebs are taught from birth by dominant cultural forces that they are Free, that they shouldn’t associate (IE network), they should remain as Free as they can, through niche consumerism and other phony identity markers… An organized fleet of privateers working in common toward both global and personal goals, sailing upon a sea of atomized individuals, larger entities having been or in the process of being broken down to the smallest possible granular level.

“By Excluding Women, The Bohemian Club Proclaims Excluding Half Of Humanity To Start With”
Oh, and as a further proof of its Anglo soul, one might add that it is apparently heavily homoerotic.
From random memory, Nixon being quoted as disliking the whole thing for being the most “faggy” event ever; gay porn actors and gay escorts contracted en masse as hired help (waiters & the like) for the event; that old leaked picture of (supposedly) Kissinger and an another fellow in drag,…
But then again, you’ve got the Larry King (not the teevee guy) saving & loan scandal branching into the quite credible lead that, as a side business, he ran a protected juvenile, mostly homo, prostitution ring for the GOP higher ups. And the male prostitute/pimp he was linked with being seemingly able to organize at will midnight tours of the White House under vice-president GHB, to impress his little pals,… Seems like conservative US Elites really are in the closet – and let’s not mention the Evangelist fundies…

Question is, apart from how faggy the Anglo elites are (response probably is, even more than what you’d think), how much of that more or less deviant sex business is psycho-sexual, and how much is self-serving? Meaning that, if one confess to his worst sexual sins during his “initiation” as a youngster, and then goes on to be serviced by male prostitutes as a middle-aged man, how likely is he to rock the boat?

Well, the wealth is arguably the other way. These people think that they can afford many children, and that’s a wealth, we don’t. A drastically simple definition of wealth, what allows a breed to survive, means that they are richer.

Luke Hatherton This is helpful. I’ve always been suspicious of teachings that criticize powerful emotions or creativity as hindrances to spiritual growth, as if neutering your personality was the key to becoming more authentically human. It’s an important distinction between having strong emotions and letting them control you.

The most cold and calculating are the odds-makers. From their perspective, Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in: http://www.oddschecker.com/…/us-presidential…/winner
2016 Presidential Election Odds | Next US President | Oddschecker

Hillary is VERY experienced. She was top lawyer, Senator of New York (like JFK, RFK), Sec. of State. She was on the Iran-Contra deal, so she knows were the bodies are buried, all the way back to Reagan. This way she is not like pseudo-naïve Obama, or even her own husband.

What Hillary would be as a president is not clear. She may well be much better than Obama. OK, not saying much. Yes. But she is a woman too, a real woman, including somewhat victimized as a woman, whereas Obama is a fake black (he was white educated in a non racist state).

Geostrategically, the US military seems the most focused on an aggressive position, because they are the most extended and retreating from being the unipolar power is not something any of the current crop of bureaucrats and politicians would find helpful to their careers and when you have fought your way to the top of that heap, nuclear war is better than losing position.

Russia and China are not as much territorially extended and are more inclined to be patient and wait for opportunities to arise, since most of the games are being played out in their back yard. So for them, it is more a matter of waiting for the western financial bubble to burst and hope that takes much of the wind out of western militaries for a few years.

That will also open a window to question the capitalist rent extraction machine and how it is not synonymous with a free market.

So, no, I don’t see nuclear war as a net positive, but I do try to be as realistic as possible.

The US military is cock sure, and is making huge mistakes with some weapon systems. Foremost the F35, which makes the entire West VERY vulnerable. If military matters were foremost, the F35 problem would be solved immediately: CANCELL the F35, BUY THE FRENCH RAFALE (the only existing, fully combat confirmed fifth generation fighter-bomber).

The financial problem exerts its corrupting influence: again, see the F35, the most expensive corruption program in history. Thus it weakens the Western military. But the Western powers don’t feel like they are dying, so they are not fixing the corruption problem. Meanwhile, people seem to be finding ever more difficult to think correctly.

An undercurrent, kept under wraps, is that many, tied to the military in the West, can only look positively to the giant wars the climate catastrophe is going to bring. Because the West could win them. And because it could help wipe out the corruption (aka the financial system). The first thing that maximum war would make irrelevant is the financial system.

World War One, and WW Two seem to be a counter-example to that. After all, Great Britain found itself with giant debt to the USA after both. Indeed. But that’s just because both war were organized, influenced, managed, connived, helped, instigated, by the financial system in the USA and its servants in the White House (presidents Wilson, a self glorifying peace apostle who used to be professor at plutocratic Princeton University; and president Roosevelt, from one of America’s most famous plutocratic family).

Thus the same system which financed Hitler, and thus the near terminal destruction of France and Great Britain, let alone the USSR and mot of Europe, organized World War Two. This was the conspiracy of all conspiracies, and, to cover it up, young Americans are taught from primary school on, that so-called “conspiracy theorists” are lunatics.

WWI and WWII are also called “total” wars and they sure were total for many of the populations affected. Just ask European Jews. However, the USA, great recipient of the World Wars I and II cornucopias, suffered only 415,000 killed (French empire killed were above 2.5 million, in World War Two alone… plus the loss of said empire, replaced by the American empire. If one adds the WWI French dead, one gets to 10% of the French population killed, similar to German losses in WWII alone; USSR’s losses were of the same order).

By historical standards, WWI and WWII for the Anglo-Saxon countries was NOT total whatsoever (although the economies got TOTALLY mobilized… different from the “TOTALITARIAN” Great Reich, which totally mobilized economically only after Albert Speer took total control, but even then, did not do it right, due to lack of brains, especially on Hitler’s part).

In case of serious war, the USA will have to reintroduce the draft overnight.

Ask yourself what is being fought over and who is doing the instigating.
Yes, the motivating idea for the US is its current state of global hegemony.
Now consider the power players in the US. They did not get to the pinnacle by having particularly grand visions, but by being the most focused and ruthless game players in the halls of power. Having a grand vision would have only detracted from their necessarily obsessive focus on playing the bureaucratic system. So just as it doesn’t really matter who the Enemy is, whether jihadists in the desert, or Putin, neither is the end result of war, or no war, a significant factor in their thought process, except as input to drive the system and keep the wheels turning.
A such, our military excursions, from Vietnam to Syria, have been inept sideshows to the game being played in Washington.
Now Putin is a martial arts aficionado, and seeing his opposition as a deluded giant, wandering around and bumping into everything, it is his game to simply wait and not get too close.
So I think we will see this situation go on for a few more years, to the point that even the worker bees in the US government and military have started to see through it and like the old Soviet Union, will implode from a lack of unity under a thoroughly corrupted leadership.
My hope anyway.

Putin got slapped in the faced with the Metrojet bombing. Now he has a problem. Namely instead of helping the ISIS, which helps Assad, he has to confront it.

The way the USA help instigate WWI and WWII was by playing weak, stupid and friendly with fascists. Under Obama, the last piece is increasingly missing: no watching Putin’s soul, and loving it, as Bush claimed he had… But the first part, playing weak is fostered, not by Obama himself, but by the deep state. In particular the incredible situation with the F35 and (secondarily) with the new class of giant carriers (named after a president who was never elected, itself a symbol of plutocracy amok)

It seems that it is the US, through the Saudis, who fostered ISIS. Presumably we have been bombing them for a year and they barely noticed. Russia bombs them for a month and they blow up a plane full of Russian tourists.

Germany in WW1 wasn’t fascist, or even Nazi. It was Imperial and there are lots of German Americans. A chaotic situation, to say the least. As for WW2, Hitler was just one more corrupt despot we “could do business with.” Until it was evident he didn’t “play by the rules” and stay in his corner, whatever he wanted to do there. War became much more about industry and bureaucracy, than nationalism. That is the “deep state.” The “MIC.”

I suspect finance is much more the weakness, than the toys it has bought. The creation of money requires public debt, so they need to buy lots of expensive toys, to spend it on.

Maybe you should read the news more carefully (tit for tat!). After the (initially peaceful) revolution against his regime started, Assad freed all the Salafist prisoners in his jails. It arranged all Salafists, as the Saudis (say) were keen to stop the secular revolution against Assad, so they financed the Salafists massively.

Bombing against ISIS has been extremely careful, to avoid collateral damage. Very few missions see bomb release. Putin does not have these problems.

“It was Imperial and there are lots of German Americans”: what kind of weird logic is that? “It was imperial and it will rain tomorrow?”

Of course Germany was fascist, of a very nasty sort of fascism, and it is why it launched World War One. The sort of accusing all powers of Europe of WWI is counterfactual (only Germany attacked).
Germany was also Nazi and war criminal. All the top German politicians and military men, the top one thousands, should have judged, found guilty, and hanged in 1919.

Why?

They were even more criminal than the Nazis of WWII (who learned from them). I have written zillions of essays on this, but will apparently have to change my methods. Maybe I should open a site called:
REAL HISTORY

Patrice,
I’m not trying to excuse anyone. Considering what went on with the colonial empires of the British and French, it seems more a matter of effectiveness or incompetence, than of moral good and bad, that dictates how the histories are written.
The US has had the advantage of 400 years of geographic, social, industrial and technological expansion to empower vast numbers of people, but lots went on that wasn’t that pretty. Similarly, especially the British were very good at expanding all over the world. Germany, on the other hand, is geographically boxed in. For them, expansion means stepping on other European people, whom other Europeans tend to be more empathetic towards, than Africans or Asians.
Which all goes back to the discussion of why anger/emotion tends to make one less objective, even though it is politically empowering. Looking at all sides and weighing them does detract from one’s focus on a particular injustice. Unfortunately, history is full of injustices.

We live on a finite planet, in which thermodynamics is the effective process. As such, geopolitics is a bit like plate tectonics. As the various plates/nations rub against and occasionally over each other, it creates earthquakes, pushes up mountain ranges, those pushed under generate heat, creating volcanos.
After awhile it settles down and the new generations accept everything as normal. Then an earthquake goes off again, or a volcano explodes.